On a steel horse I ride
The event at MIT — part of a lengthy “world tour” in which, for the Boston stop, the game was demoed in the back of a semi truck and featured a performance from local umpteen-lead-singer rockers Bang Camaro— is actually my second time playing Rock Band, though it is my first foray into pounding the skins (as it were). The first was a recent semi-exclusive field trip to Harmonix’s offices on Mass Ave in Central Square, during which a handful of Phoenix staffers got a chance to play the game and film ourselves doing so for a video-blog entry. The team comprised myself, Will “Not Swallows” Spitz, Carly “Not Simon” Carioli, and three members of the Phoenix’s in-house band, Hookers and Blow. The Harmonix crew let us jam — or whatever the video-game equivalent of “jamming” is — for about two hours, which easily could have turned into four or five had their security staff not thrown us out on our oh-so-ready-to-rock asses.

The Harmonix receptionist is a guy with spiky hair and piercings who looks like he is in his 30s. Above his head on the wall is a framed illustration of The Simpsons’ Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, blissfully wielding a toy instrument: “Sitar Hero.” This building once served as offices for Harvard’s Korea Institute — the Harvard logo still adorns the plastic name cards on each door.

We’re led into a large room where Rock Band is being set up for us. This is Harmonix’s sacred inner-sanctum practice space, and it’s outfitted with a gigantic plasma-screen TV, a purple futon, a bunch of Christmas lights, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s for, we’re later told by Sean Baptiste — Harmonix’s handlebar-mustachioed director of community relations and the de-facto spokesperson for Rock Band— “when the Narragansett runs out.”

There’s also more than one Xbox 360 gaming console, and a plethora of various Rock Band instruments, including the Fender Stratocaster–style guitar controllers, complete with an additional set of buttons high on the neck so you can solo like a pro. The walls are decorated with poster-size pictures of a bass-guitar headstock (the part with the tuning pegs) and a drum kit— icons that appear in Rock Band to help you differentiate your performance from those of your teammates. And it’s Friday, all-company lunch day, so the halls smell of egg rolls and lo mein. Harmonix, it seems, has come a long way since Guitar Hero was released two years ago.

Back then, the company hadn’t yet begun its world domination in earnest. Harmonix’s then–public-relations director showed up at Phoenix HQ to drop off a copy of Guitar Hero, which was, at the time, a PlayStation-only product. Somehow, it ended up in my possession, so a friend and I decided to try it out. I had played games like Dance Dance Revolution and found them to be, for the most part, goofy — games that only made you feel like a self-conscious buffoon. The music was mostly bad, the actual gameplay mechanics induced the stuff of recurring performance-anxiety nightmares (“I have to dance? In front of people?”), and the visual presentations were overly slick and busy, as though they were trying to mimic a lame music video. So I was skeptical about Guitar Hero. While similar games were (and still are) popular, it seemed like there was no way to make them actually cool.

Review: Guitar Hero: Smash Hits When evaluating a new Guitar Hero — or any music-related game — it helps to picture a Venh Diagram consisting of three circles: "Good Songs," "Challenging Songs," and "Songs that are fun to play on plastic instruments."

Players only Jessica Smith has spent years booking death-metal shows around Boston. On top of loads of meat-and-potatoes nights at O'Brien's in Allston and Dee Dee's in Quincy, two of her shows — Origin and Malevolent Creation — actually sold out the Middle East upstairs.

Review: Green Day: Rock Band Activision has pumped out rhythm games centered on a single band — Aerosmith, Metallica, and Van Halen have all had their own Guitar Hero . Harmonix has offered only The Beatles: Rock Band . Until now.

Bang Camaro fight the business of rock It was January 6, 2009, on the set of The Late Show down in New York City, and Conan O'Brien just couldn't shut up about Bang Camaro. Even the normally stoic Max Weinberg admitted to being a fan.

REVIEW: THE NEWSROOM | June 20, 2012 The Newsroom is a dose of concentrated Sorkin, by turns maddening and exhilarating.

HBO'S VEEP NEEDS MORE MEAN | April 23, 2012 Reality, right now, is so absurd that almost everyone has already adopted a "laugh-to-keep-from-crying" approach to the news. We don't need someone to tell us how truly horrifying our political landscape is. So what's a satirist to do?